Drive Revenue with Reimbursements

Increasing Hospital Reimbursements with the Clinical Dietetic Workbench


Leveraging Technology to Document & Code for Malnutrition within Compliance.
Guaranteeing Approved Hospital Reimbursements

ABSTRACT
Coding for Malnutrition in the Hospital: Does It Change Reimbursement?


Protein calorie malnutrition (PCM) is prevalent in the acute care setting, affecting up to 50% of hospitalized patients. PCM is associated with poor outcomes, including increased hospital and intensive care unit length of stay, hospital readmission rates, incidence of pressure injuries and nosocomial infections, and mortality. PCM is a financial burden on the healthcare system through direct costs related to treatment as well as indirect costs related to poorer outcomes and complications. Medical coding for malnutrition after a patient's hospital stay is poorly representative of the actual prevalence of malnutrition, as only a small percentage of these hospital stays are coded for PCM.

Improvements in identification and coding of malnutrition can result in significant increases in hospital reimbursement, which can in part help defray increased costs associated with the condition.

The Clinical Dietetic Workbench Increases Reimbursements

Providing Dietitians with ALL THE TOOLS they need to be Successful

in the acute care space

A challenge that continues to present for healthcare administrators is to balance an initiative’s outcomes to cost/benefit. The deployment of the ML Clinical Dietetics Program in healthcare operations guarantees to DRIVE REVENUE by increasing the amount of successful Malnutrition Code Claims submitted.


The Invisible Epidemic

Malnutrition is a global crisis:

• Today, one-in-three patients are being admitted to the hospital with malnutrition and one-in-three are discharged with malnutrition.

• 23% of patients discharged with undiagnosed/untreated malnutrition are readmitted within 30 days

• The costs associated with malnutrition is greater than the costs associated to cancer and heart disease combined


Unfortunately opportunities for reimbursement are not utilized to the fullest potential.  Dietitians do not always have the access to tools for implementation within their hospitals to ensure documentation is standardized, resulting in successful malnutrition coding claims. 

The Menu Logistics Clinical Dietetic Workbench comes equipped with all the documentation standard tools; providing malnutrition risk identification in real time 24/7 on admission and throughout the hospital stay, thorough clinical assessment documentation including Nutrition Focused Physical Examination, seamless communication between clinicians and doctors on the basis of matching malnutrition diagnosis and reporting access that provides all the information billing will need to ensure malnutrition claims are submitted and approved.